After a difficult start to F1 2025 saw Red Bull opt for change by moving Liam Lawson back to Racing Bulls, Laurent Mekies believes the Kiwi is almost back at his best.

With the Red Bull RB21 proving a difficult beast to handle for Lawson as a rookie, Red Bull made the difficult call to swap Lawson back into the sister Racing Bulls team and give the trickier car to the more experienced Yuki Tsunoda.

Laurent Mekies: Racing Bulls focused on restoring Liam Lawson’s confidence

The call to get Lawson out of the Red Bull and into the more compliant, albeit a little slower, Racing Bulls car has been made with Lawson’s best interests at heart.

While the Kiwi may have been brimming with self-confidence and a self-awareness about the need for him to adjust to the unique driving demands of the RB21, the reality of the situation – accentuated by Max Verstappen’s usual relentlessness after almost a decade of familiarity with Red Bull’s car designs – threatened to send Lawson into a spiral which could have irreversibly shaken his confidence.

With just 11 races under his belt, which had been done across two short stints in 2023 and ’24, Lawson’s relative inexperience meant Red Bull had to make a decision on whether to continue with him in the senior team, or swap him with the vastly more experienced Yuki Tsunoda – a driver decision many have felt would have been the correct one to make in the first place.

Having served his time at Racing Bulls since making his F1 debut in 2021, Tsunoda stepped up to Red Bull for the Japanese Grand Prix while Lawson withdrew from the glare of the spotlight and back to the familiar environs of a team he had just said ‘ciao’ to.

As well-prepared for the challenge Lawson had appeared to be, the true extent of the challenge – going up against the unshakeable Verstappen in a car that’s become increasingly obvious is far from easy to drive – had sent his head spinning.

Despite his short time away from Racing Bulls, a team in which Lawson has become beloved over the past two years, not everything was exactly as he’d left it. The arrival of another rookie, Isack Hadjar, had seen the Frenchman assigned to Lawson’s vacated garage space after F1 2024, including picking up Lawson’s former race engineer Pierre Hamelin.

Lawson, instead, is now working with what had been Tsunoda’s side of the garage and his race engineer Ernesto Derniderio.

“Yeah, he [jokingly] complained about that!” Racing Bulls team boss Laurent Mekies laughed as he sat down with PlanetF1.com in his office over the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend.

“He’s on the other side of the garage. He was confused on the first day, but he’s adapted pretty well now!

“We discussed it when we welcomed him back and we felt very comfortable with it being that way – and he felt comfortable with that way. So, aside from getting confused when walking into the garage, we think it was the best way forward.

“He took Yuki’s crew and he has Yuki’s race engineer.”

While Racing Bulls does use all the permitted Transferrable Components it can get from Red Bull, such as rear suspension and assemblies, the decision to swap the drivers at the two teams illustrates the clear difference in handling characteristics between the RB21 and the VCARB02.

This is at its most evident when it comes to talk of the operating ‘window’ of the car, in which drivers and their crew work hard to achieve the right setup to unlock the maximum pace and balance possible. In the Red Bull, this window is tiny – to the point where even the experienced Verstappen isn’t always able to find it. For Lawson, it was nigh-on impossible.

At Racing Bulls, he’s already confirmed the wider operating window is making life easier but, having spent the winter driving the RB21 in the simulator and in real life, is having to use his first Grands Prix adjusting to the Faenza squad’s less peaky machine.

“The first thing is, obviously, to put him back into being comfortable in the car. That’s what we are focusing on,” Mekies said of that challenge.

“He had lost that confidence in these two very difficult races, and what we are focusing on is that he is comfortable in the car and that he feels comfortable enough to push.

“If we tick these two boxes, we know the talent has not disappeared. The speed is going to come back.

“So it’s only been [three] races with us. We’ve seen already a clear step forward between Japan and Bahrain.”

In Saudi Arabia, Lawson out-qualified Hadjar for the first time, and finished just behind his teammate on track – his race undone by a 10-second time penalty for going off-track in a battle with Alpine’s Jack Doohan.

With Lawson having developed a pallor as he walked around, seemingly dazed, during his first two races this year, the Kiwi has clearly bounced back – the self-doubt melting away as the VCARB02 starts to click with his natural abilities.

“You may not have seen it on the timesheet but, for us, from a data perspective, what he does with the car and the way he’s pushing the car, it’s clearly a step forward,” Mekies said, “so we expect him to keep ramping up.”

What’s curious about the Red Bull experiment is the extent to which Lawson appeared to have been caught out by its intricacies. After all, this is a driver who flitted around from Formula 2, F1, DTM, and Super Formula in a very short space of time in recent years, and flourished in all of them.

One would imagine the RB21 wouldn’t be as big a challenge as that of stepping into a car in a completely different category, but perhaps Lawson’s issues weren’t entirely down to the car…

“The truth is, I don’t know,” Mekies said when asked why Lawson’s step up didn’t work out on this occasion.

“I think it was a surprise, for all of us, the fact that he has struggled there as much as he did so. I don’t know what it was down to.

“For sure, it’s easy to underestimate, when you are not there, the level of pressure that you get at that end of the grid, and, therefore things can become difficult very, very quickly.

“Luckily, we have a bit of time now here to get it back to a level where he is comfortable to push. We think that, if we do that, the speed that he showed last year and the speed that he showed two years ago, it’s going to be there again, and we will get back to good [things].

“I think he knows he has mega support from everyone here. The best we can do is to make sure we guide him towards being able to push in the car. I think he’s ticking things very well. He’s making steps with us.

“It doesn’t mean that we agree all the time, but he’s certainly very open to working in a way that he can find that sort of trust, again, with the car.”

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